Photography: Flower Buds

Not all of the snow has melted yet, though most of it has. We'll probably get another snowfall this season.

My friends in New Zealand are harvesting their gardens. In Florida people already have flowers. I'm just starting to see signs of spring in central Illinois, though that used to happen later in the year than it does now. ellenmillion up in Alaska probably won't see the ground for quite a while yet.

Where are you at?

>> New zealand is Southern hemisphere. Kinda changes things.<<

Yeah, but it's fun to see what is going on in other parts of the world. I like the parallax.

>>I'm in upstate NY. Bloody wretched weather. <<

Alas! I've heard about the snow dumps there.

>>Interesting, Illinois seems to be rather the poster-child for the lengthened growing season.<<

Yes, it's VERY different now than it was a few decades ago. When I was little, the snow cover was deep and persistent in winter -- we used to build snow caves behind the garage. Now, we can count individual snowstorms. It's bizarre. This used to be USDA Zone 5b and is now 6a.

That changes what grows here and what kind of wildlife there is. I'm seeing orioles occasionally now. I think our robins have given up migrating. I freaked the first time I saw a velvet ant and stomped it flat; those SO do not belong around here.

>> Here there has been no statistically significant change. <<

That's interesting. Some areas seem to be relatively stable. Others are shifting in a particular direction. Some are so chaotic that a new pattern is impossible to discern. The more I read about different places, though, the easier it is to make sense of the big picture.

Yes, it's alarming when the weather phenomena get more extreme. We're losing some of our buffers. (Some of that, of course, is due to factors already known; frex, large expanses of forests buffer rain cycles and inhibit flooding, but we've been clearcutting for ages.) People need to think about not just the environmental damage, which is bad; but also the human costs and financial costs, which hinder our ability to make necessary changes.

One of the really troublesome things here in the flats is the new wind walls. Now when we get a storm, it often arrives with a very sudden, narrow wall of intense wind. Neither buildings nor trees can withstand the abrupt stress, so there is a lot more damage happening. I've seen trees snapped off right above the ground. Sometimes it's tornado weather, but often it's not -- just a storm front with that damn bow wall. This sort of thing has always been possible, but used to be really rare. It's a repeated hazard now. The normal weather has warped into something much more destructive. That worries me.

Not long ago, it was! There are still a few patches where the deeper drifts were, though most is melted by now. I took some other pictures while it was melting.

I like daffodils. I have white ones, yellow ones, yellow with orange cups, and some white with salmon cups.